TheBreakingClause7thEditionPreview

Cover by: Anneka Demetriou
Copyright
Published by Smartass Publishers
ISBN: 9781999599904
All characters and events in this
publication, other than those clearly in
the public domain, are fictional and
any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental
Copyright © 2021 by James Agerholm
All rights reserved. No parts of this

publication may be reproduced, stored
on a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any firm or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of the
publisher.

For my parents and sister.
James Agerholm
“In the midst of chaos there
is also opportunity.”
- Sun Tzu
The Art of War

Prologue
A glimpse – or not even that – just a
sliver of that early-morning sunlight
shined through the slits between the
white shutters that fell down in front
of the window. This caused the light to
scatter and fly across the room;
seeming as if an angel’s halo had been
thrown in and smashed apart into thin,
long, sharp slices of luminescence that
raced across the room with glee. Alison
squinted, put her hands in front of her
face to stop the sheering, bright light
blinding her, and she pushed herself
up so that she could swing her legs off
the bed. She padded along the blue
bedroom’s fake wool carpet to the

window, where she reached upwards
and dragged the white string
downwards so hard that the shutters
shot upwards rapidly; sounding like a
set of sails of a galley being drawn up
in a gale. The view was spectacular;
white sand stretched as far as the
horizon from which the bright yellow
sun was rising slowly up into the rich,
cloudless, navy sky; shining down
onto the desert below. She smiled,
turned around, put on a long white t-
shirt and went off to get breakfast

Chapter 1
2020s
Sam pushed his chair backwards
quickly and viciously away from his
fake marble-textured, white painted
wooden desk. Even though its legs
were finished with black, smooth
rubber wheels, these still caused a
howling screech as the oak wooden
floor, unsuccessfully, resisted being
refashioned with deep, undesirable
tread marks. The sound from this
bounced on and off the bleached white

walls of the cavernous, crowded, but
otherwise deadly quiet hall-like office
that he was sitting in. This sat at the
top of a towering, grey concrete
skyscraper in the middle of the city,
looming over the thousands of
individuals and vehicles that buzzed
around its foundations; working
tirelessly to support the infinite and
merciless needs of the wires that kept
Sam and his colleagues’ society
upright.
He glared at the numbers in the
Excel window on the white HD screen
in front of him; something was wrong,
he knew it – someone had messed up.
After he had counted up
everything again, he calculated the
progression of the profits and it

ecame obvious that there was less
than there should be. He entered the
numbers into several types of statistic
and financial software programs that
were available to him and his
suspicions were confirmed. And so,
after he had processed them into a zip
format, he dragged all the files onto his
personal email and flew them off to his
manager whom he hoped would have
a much better understanding about
this than himself.
In less than ten minutes he felt his
phone, surprisingly not his office one,
chirping at him from the inside pocket
of his black jacket that sat on the back
of his office chair. He reached back and
picked it up.
“Yes?” he asked, with that sharp,

arrogant and slightly disingenuous
tone that he had unintentionally
picked up in only the last few months
that he had been working in the city.
“Mr. Patel can you please come to
my office?” It was, unsurprisingly to
Sam, his boss.
“I’ll be there in a second.”
After walking quickly across the
same wooden floor that appeared in
every office of the building, Sam
reached the red door of his boss’ office.
It had the name, Alex Golding,
stencilled in fake gold italic letters at
the top of the doorframe. He knocked
gently.
A voice from inside called out -
“Come in!”
Sam twisted the steel handle

downwards and pushed the door
open.
“Ah, Mr. Patel, thank you for
coming,” said the sharp-faced figure
that Sam knew was his boss, Alex,
despite never having talked to him
before. He was at least in his early
fifties or older but he had the physique
of someone in their late thirties who
frequently visited the gym.
“My pleasure.” Sam replied just a
bit too quickly really for his own
liking.
“Sorry, we don’t really have time
for the normal pleasantries.” Alex
commented with a twitch on the right
side of his lips and a glance at his
computer screen before he said to Sam,
while still looking at the screen. “It

would seem you have discovered
something that might interest me.
Could you please show it to me
again?”
“Of course.”
And Sam grabbed one of the
wooden, wheelie chairs that were
stacked up in the corner of the office,
rolled it over to the desk and sat down
beside Alex. He quickly located and
defined the figures that he had
discovered, dragged them onto a new
file and showed the estimates of the
profits and the losses of the company’s
investments in several international
research companies that sold patents to
other, much larger, pharmaceutical
companies.
“Right.” said Alex to Sam while he

was flickering the cursor across the
screen, “I see, that should be quite easy
to fix now we know. Thank God you
saw this before it became irreversible. I
can see you’re going to go far with us.”
Sam grinned, “No, thank you, I’m
glad I could help.”
Sam left Alex’s room with a bit of a
swagger. He had only been there just
over a month, but he had already
contributed to the fundamentals. Even
more importantly, the big man of the
department had noticed him - things
are going well he summarised to
himself.
He felt light hearted for the rest of
-

the day and all the data recording;
which he normally found suicideprovokingly
dull, went like nothing. It
got to five o’clock and all his
colleagues were starting to leave so he
shut down his laptop and filed the
papers that he had been analysing that
afternoon.
Nothing else out of the ordinary
had sprung up on him so he stood up,
put his jacket back on and wandered
off to the elevators on his floor. He
worked very high up in the building,
so it was going to take him quite some
time to reach the ground floor of the
seventy-seven-floor rise skyscraper. It
was also rush hour, so the elevator
stopped at nearly every floor to allow
another influx of people to get on.

After about thirty floors, Sam
found himself shoved into the back
corner of the elevator. To his right
there was a forty-something large,
balding man, who looked like he had
let himself go. He could feel his heavy
built, sweaty frame pushing him
backwards into the form of a pretty
woman who was about his age. He
quickly apologised.
“I’m so sorry, there’s this guy on
my other side who’s taking a bit more
space than he really should be.”
She looked up at him with
sparkling green eyes.
“Ha…that’s fine, don’t worry. This
is my first week here so I’m just
adjusting to this new environment of
mine.” and she flashed a big grin at

him with its white, symmetrical teeth.
He smiled back. “It’s going take us
a long time to get to the bottom floor.
What’s your name?”
“Anouska, or my friends call me
Nousk. I work for the health insurance
department on the fiftieth floor. It’s a
bit depressing really. What do you
do?”
“I’m Sam, I work for the finance
analysis department, based on the
seventy fifth. Normally it’s not a lot of
fun, but it does have its perks.”
They continued their social banter
until the machine stopped at another
floor and there was a jolt. This time a
larger influx of people entered the
elevator and the bigger man was
budged backwards. This separated

Sam and Anouska, and pretty quickly
they both found themselves in
different groups of identically suited
business people on opposite sides of
the lift.
Sam tried to get up onto his tiptoes
so he could see where she was, but
even though he was tall, Anouska was
completely hidden by the crowd of
tailored fabric that surrounded her.
Feeling disappointed, he dropped back
onto his heels and thought that,
maybe, he could catch her when they
got to the ground floor.
For the next ten minutes or so Sam
stood there listening to the office
banter of mostly middle-aged men and
women. These conversations were
limited; particularly as they were

generally orientated around the topics
of their partners, houses, mortgages or
their children. Sometimes a comment
about a football team that someone
supported would turn up, which was a
bit of a relief. The tiny free surface area
of the elevator became tighter and
tighter every it stopped and Sam was
pushed further and further back into
the corner. He could feel his heart rate
spiking and his breathing becoming
faster and faster as the population of
the lift increased exponentially every
time the machine stopped.
Eventually, he felt the elevator
resting to its final position on the
ground floor and its steel, curved
double doors sprang open to the
whitewashed lobby of the bank. Sam

felt his shoulders relaxing, his
breathing slowing and his heart rate
returning to its normal rate as people
started to walk out.
He was nearly the last person to
leave, so he peered around trying to
see Anouska in the crowd of men and
women who were now rushing home
like a swarm of black beetles; fighting
over each other to reach their prey.
There must have been hundreds of
them he guessed as he followed, or
was more pushed by, them out of the
building, where he quickly found
himself in the limestone paved
courtyard which had preened flower
pots and emerald green coloured
bushes dotted all around it. These were
supposed to reduce the city’s frantic,

usy ambience that stood only twenty
yards away over the very high grey
concrete walls that enclosed the
courtyard.
He looked around and saw Nousk.
She was sitting there quietly on a dark,
wooden bench on the other side of the
courtyard, adjacent to a bright bush
with yellow dandelions shooting from
its roots. He started walking towards
her, but when he was not even halfway
there, he saw a broad shouldered,
slightly taller man than himself,
approaching her. He noticed her
looking up at him from the phone that
she had been texting on and she stood
up, took a couple of steps towards him,
gave him a kiss on each cheek and
hugged him tightly.

Sam shrugged and said to himself.
Maybe not this time, I have had a
constructive day at work, you can’t have
everything you wish for. There are always
more fish in the sea and all that.
He walked out into the busy, loud,
frantic environment of the road outside
of the courtyard and put himself onto a
bus to get home.
-
He got off at the bus stop on the
high street and started walking back to
his flat on the first floor of a white,
Edwardian built terraced house that
sat a bit back away from the pavement
of a wide thoroughfare. Sam could
hear the sound of the traffic roaring

along it even in the earliest hours of
the morning when he was in bed. Even
though he hadn’t been there that long,
he now felt that he might have
problems sleeping without that nearly
continuous, whirring noise buzzing
through his windows. He blundered
along, smiling at the very wellgroomed
oak trees that ran all along
his road. It was beautiful, as the sunset
shined through the autumn, orangetinted
leaves that now looked
relatively sparse compared to what
they had looked like only that
morning, and he could feel the fallen
under his feet. These felt as if they had
all massed together and had been
cemented onto the pavement as some
sort of an organic, artificial, wool-like,

novel compound that cushioned every
step he took nicely.
He rented a small studio flat and,
with his already decent salary, he
probably could have afforded a much
better and a bigger place, but he didn’t
want to look like a snob and anyway, if
it was smaller, there was less space
that he had to keep clean. Not that his
accommodation was ever particularly
very well looked after, but he
definitely felt less guilty if the area of
disarray that he personally oversaw
was relatively small.
On his way home he saw an old
man in a large black raincoat sitting
against a brick wall. This was good
because Sam could feel that it had
started to rain, with a splatter of the

drops flickering down onto his face.
The old man also had a small damp,
dark grey mongrel lying beside him
with rain drops quickly running down
onto its nose and off its tip.
He crouched down in front of the
man and offered him the still sealed
packet of salt and vinegar crisps that
he had put into his jacket pocket before
he got onto the bus but had completely
forgotten about due to his thoughts
about Anouska.
“Thank you,” said the old man,
who took it, opened the packet and
quickly started consuming its contents,
with old smiling wrinkles appearing
upon his cheeks.
Sam patted the head of the dog
gently, smiled back at the man, stood

up and walked back home.
-
After Sam had eventually shoved
the front door of the house open - still
a bit stiff due to the recent restoration
of the building - he climbed up the
new steel staircase and onto the first
floor, unlocked his flat’s navy coloured
door and threw his tailored black
jacket onto a two-seated sofa.
-
He slept well that night until his
mobile woke him up with that
annoying “good morning, it’s before
eight” rhythm ring tone.

The sun hadn’t even risen yet and,
except for the poor lighting outside
that reached through the window’s
curtains from the street lights and the
front lights of the few speeding cars
that drove along the road at this time
in the morning, there was only
darkness. He grabbed at his lamp’s
switch, pressed it and he could now
see where his mobile had fallen down
from his bedside table and onto the
floor with its power cable still plugged
into the wall socket. He picked it up
and brought it up to his ear.
“Sam! Sorry to call you at this time
in the morning, but we need you to
come to the office ASAP.” It was Alex,
and he sounded especially worried.
Sam frowned, “Sure, no problem,

although can I at least ask why you
need me at this ungodly hour?”
“I’ve been talking to the CEO of
the Bank in the States about the data
that you discovered and we have
decided that, as you were the one who
discovered it, you might be able to give
us a better idea of the possibilities and
situations we might find ourselves in.”
“I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Very good, I’ll see you soon.”
Sam put on the same clothes that
he had worn the day before from a pile
of unwashed clothes that he had left on
the floor just beside his bed, cleared his
throat and woke himself up quickly
with a glass of water from the sink. He
ran out of the house and got to the city
centre only twenty minutes after he

had put the phone down.
-
“Thank you for coming at such
short notice.” Alex said to Sam while
taking the phone away from his ear
and gesturing towards him to sit
down, “could you please - just broadly
- explain what you saw yesterday. I’ve
already described the problem to our
superior and the possible options that
we can take. I could try to explain
more, but he wants to hear it from the
horse’s mouth, as that old saying
goes.”
Sam took the phone and, after the
normal niceties of a conversation

etween a boss and his employee, he
slowly explained the figures and the
time lines that he had seen the day
before. After five minutes of him
babbling in numeric and algebraic
phenomena, the American on the other
end of the line eventually interrupted
him and said that he was very grateful
and was now satisfied about what Sam
had told him and asked him to return
the phone back to Alex.
Alex, who had been leaning back
in his black office chair while looking
at Sam intently when he had been on
the phone, took it back with a smile
and apologised again about the early
morning call. He then suggested, or
more ordered, Sam to go home and
have the rest of the day off.

Sam left the skyscrapers’ courtyard
entrance and walked into the high
street that was already starting to get
busy. He suddenly became aware of
the lack of sleep he had had and he
could barely keep himself awake on
his way back home. He sat on the top
floor of the bus; wishing that glass was
made of a much softer material, as he
kept banging the left side of his head
into the window every time the double
decker vehicle jolted or shuddered to a
stop.
Eventually he got to the stop that was
closest to his home and got off through
the double glass doors of the bus after
-

they had opened with a hiss and
screech. Nearly as soon as both of his
feet where on the pavement, there was
a sound that could be directly
referenced to something between a
deep sigh and an expression of great
relief as the doors behind him closed
with the satisfaction that only an
inanimate object could possibly have.
He stood at the edge of the curb of the
long road near to his home. He had
been living there long enough to know
that the next pedestrian crossing was
more than five minutes away, there
and back, and it would be easier and
quicker if he just quickly crossed the
road from where he was standing now.
He looked both ways and the road
wasn’t very busy. It was also only six

thirty in the morning and the traffic
tended not to appear until at least
seven so Sam started to cross the road,
wishing for his bed. He had only got
two thirds of the way across when he
suddenly heard the sound of brakes
being pressed down sharply with a
deafening screech. Then everything
went black.
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